Leviathan or The Whale

cream-painted and crowned telephone boxes–a defiantly independent network for an imperial place.
    As you descend to the banks of the estuary, the industrial sprawl becomes evident; factories compete with retail sheds to brutalize the landscape. They cannot quite destroy the impression, so carefully constructed by the civic forefathers, of an age of trade and certitude; of an affluence set in sandstone and grand municipal works. In the city centre, at the end of a narrow street, is the gabled home of Hull’s favoured son: William Wilberforce, liberator of slaves and founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Nearby stands a giant column, surmounted by a statue of the man, broadcasting his achievement in capital letters–
    NEGRO SLAVERY
ABOLISHED
1 AUGUST
MDCCCXXXIV

    –although it faces another building, one that belies the city’s claim to manumission.
    Passing through the double doors with their polished brass fingerplates, I follow a sombre corridor over which hangs a skeleton, showing the way, just as I can hear a strange sound rising to a stifled focus, sometimes like a choirboy, sometimes like a trapped dog, luring me on, just as all the sounds I ever heard are compressed into one continuous noise in my head. The lighting is barely brighter in the room beyond. There is a bench, although not for public use. It is built from the bones of a whale: blade bones for the seat, ribs for the back and arms. Next to it is a hat stand created from a narwhal’s tusk nailed to a wooden base.
    On the far wall of this macabre salon hang a pair of portraits both labelled, confusingly, William Scoresby. In the first, a rotund man points over a homely cottage to a ship in the distance; with his white waistcoat, belly and ruddy face, he might be a bluff farmer, rather than a reaper of the sea. The second picture shows his son in starched collar and stock; his are the refined features of a man of the Enlightenment. Between them, these two Scoresbys–one a lifelong merchantman, the other destined to be a fellow of the Royal Society–preside over a collection whose enthusiasm for its subject has faded over the years, like a stamp album put away in the attic, partly from embarrassment at such youthful and compulsive fervour.
    The museum’s displays are contrived to resemble a ship’s superstructure. Everything seems subfusc. Set into the bulwarks are framed photographs, backlit to give them life, although one might almost wish they weren’t. Sepia ghosts projected out of the ether, Yorkshire’s hardy sons labour in the Arctic, in scenes as industrial as any in Bradford’s mills. Tall ships stand glamorously rigged in the ancient sunlight, while their workers’ faces stare out, stilled in the moment.
    Above them, curious souvenirs are caught in the cordage. Hauled up the mainmast is the sleek carcase of a narwhal, its leopard spots losing their sheen; its tusk points downwards like a dart, about to impale itself in the deck below. A sailor saunters by this lynching, adjusting his hat for the photographer’s lens.
    From another chain hangs another prize: a polar bear, caught up at its waist like a wet fur rug. It dangles snout-heavy claws unsheathed as though only just yanked off the ice as it pawed at the water for fish. Behind it, the ship’s laundry flutters in the breeze. A third photograph, almost unbearably sad, shows a young bear still clinging to its mother’s dead body. Destined for life in a zoo, cubs were brought back in barrels barred at the top. Adults were chained to the mast like dogs. Sailors feared them more than whales: Horatio Nelson, who sailed to the Arctic on the unpropitiously named HMS
Carcass
in 1773, nearly died when he tried to kill a polar bear as a prize for his father.
    A nearby canvas dramatizes just such a scene. Painted in 1829 by William John Huggins–later maritime artist to William IV, the Sailor King–it is entitled
Harmony
, after the main ship in the picture, although that is hardly an appropriate description. With an unerring eye for detail, Huggins has sought to record every activity carried out by the whaling fleet in the north. Presided over by a distant iceberg that erupts like a frozen flame from the sea, the picture presents an icy Eden under assault. In one corner bobs a baby-eyed walrus, plaintively addressing the viewer while three narwhals flee, tusks tilted high. A sailor stands over a seal, raising his club. The beast backs off towards the edge of the floe,